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Messages - Hammish

#316
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod
July 15, 2014, 05:14:53 AM
Not going to be released BTC 0.11 until after the coming VE patch, but I figured I'd give some teasers here on what to expect. :)

First, Joe is much nicer to you now; upon finishing his intro quest he'll offer you a choice as to what ship you want to suit the role you want to play in the game: fighter, interceptor or industrial. :)

Gauss cannon finished, added and tested.
Kinetic missiles finished, added and tested.

New engine, power, shield and RCS options added!

Engines follow the general path of speed or maneuverability being stressed.  RCS units are the same, with a military RCS for better maneuver or thruster rerouting systems to channel the RCS system into better speed.

Power plants come in three varieties:
-Fusion, good power output
-Fission, good fuel efficiency
-Tritium, excellent max capacitor

Shields come in four varieties:
-Standard
-Barriers that have a high capacity but recharge slowly
-Integrity fields that never go down but have a very low deflection rating (think of them as a secondary armor that is percentage-based)
-Adaptive shields that have a low capacity but can regenerate in combat (they reset almost instantly but with no reestablishment value, giving them a slow trickle of recharge)

Hulls renamed to stick with some new theming and adjusted!  They also have four ranks: Civilian, Mk I, Mk I, Experimental.
The Athena replaces the Banshee as the standard fighter archetype.  Still an energy/ballistic user.
The Apollo replaces the Avalanche as the standard interceptor type, reworked for full missile use.
The Hephaestus replaces the mining vessel, reworked for additional bonuses to miner-y stuff.
The Ares replaces the Orca, multirole mid-sized ship.
The Artemis replaces the Fang as a bomber, same basic concept of being a glass cannon missile sled.  The experimental version upgrades two of the launchers.
The Poseidon replaces the Crab, reworked slightly into a brawler with an outstanding ability to take and deal with damage.  The experimental version, even moreso.
The Hades will use the new Deathbringer hull as a heavy cruiser.  Decent hull but no innate armor, fair maneuver, lots of damage from those large mounts.  The experimental version trades the large energy along the centerline along with some agility for linked large missiles, turning the craft into a siege machine.
The Zeus replaces the Hammer, reworked into a battlecruiser.  Larger, slower-turning guns, also exceptionally durable.  The experimental version upgrades the bore on the ballistic mounts.

On the horizon:
Mine weapons.  I'll totally get around to adding my version of them.  One of them will obviously have to be the B.U.T.T. (Backward Utilized Tracking Torpedo), to score points with anyone who has played any of the Star Control games.  Spathi FTW.

NewTech (tm) versions of the rest of the gear, including radars, grapplers, modules and boosters.  Boosters in particular will have a lot of variations given the sheer number of new adjustable variables coming with the next patch.

The Dionysus hull, a refit of the Artemis.  Still testing out this concept but it plays like a very high-skill-required dogfighter.  It sports ballistic weapons instead of missiles, exceptionally limited tracking arcs with all four firing into the front arc, but gains maneuver bonuses (especially to strafe).  The key skill for this ship is to be able to strafe around targets and keep them to your nose while dodging fire, specially designed to help counter some of the heavier vessels.

The Cronus hull, brand new design (assuming my friend with actual modelling skills comes through for me. :)  The first true battleship concept, I'm looking to introduce the Cronus titan as the first 'boss encounter' or unique quest mob put out.  Large amounts of structure and armor as well as four large weapon mounts will make him a monster, but a monster with weaknesses (and a unique playstyle, as a playable ship, if ever.)  The basic gist will be two weapons that fire with a fairly wide (about 210 degrees) but slow-tracking arc into the front (one above the hull, one below) with a duplicated style in the back facing to the aft.  It gives the hull some teeth in any direction but makes it uniquely suited to broadside attacks where it can bring all four weapon mounts to bear.  Really looking forward to this one.

Mysterious Tech!  (Oooh, so mysterious!)  This will just be a stopgap measure until full crafting is put into the game, at which point I will revise it.  Starting at level 50, the NPCs that spawn have a chance of dropping Mysterious Tech that you can snatch up and collect.  (It will also drop more frequently from quest-related NPCs such as bounty quests.)  'But Hammish', you might ask, 'What does it do, other than being mysterious?'  Well, each faction will have a named NPC who desires to have these mysterious bits (don't ask, they have -REASONS-).  These NPCs will also have question options corresponding to each of the Experimental Gear bits in the game... and one of the requirements will be bringing them X pieces of Mysterious Tech in addition to a base item and plenty of cash.  TL;DR, if you want the highest-tier stuff you'll have to do some work as they'll no longer be shop-purchasable but only available via these quests if you have the tech fragments.
#317
I can sympathize a bit, I've been reworking them in BTC a touch as well, though I'm waiting until you guys release this megapatch before I put out a new public version so I can see what all needs changing and adapt in some of the new stuff you've shown off. :)

Grats on the progress, though!  Your comment about the art made me want to ask, too, do you guys have by chance higher-resolution versions of the art you've been using for buttons?  (Skills, items, ect.).  I was hoping to use some of it in the style I designed for items in my mod, but I'm running into issues with the fact that the aliasing on the shrunk versions in the .CPK make copying them over to anything else more or less impossible.  If not, that's cool as well, just figured I'd ask.
#318
Ideas and suggestions / Re: Some suggestions
July 11, 2014, 08:33:25 PM
Makes sense.  Will look forward to it. :)
#319
If you wanted to keep tabs to a minimum, you could always just rename misc as well, in the end.  Maybe make it something like 'Civilian' or the like, out of combat stuff, with a combination of the social traits and the crafting/mining you mentioned.  Can't really think of anything else to add in there for now, though!
#320
Ideas and suggestions / Re: Some suggestions
July 11, 2014, 02:36:39 AM
Figure I'll try to keep all suggestions in one thread here. :)

UI suggestion (not sure how difficult it'd be to put in): Power management tally.  Would be handy to have a summary screen that shows how much power is being produced by the plant versus how much was being consumed by systems either non-stop (shields and the like), on engine activation (engine + RCS), or misc.  It'd be a great help in determining exactly how much juice we had left to run the guns... or you could even include a figure in there for how much drain the guns would induce while all recharging.
#321
Looks good to me as well.  Only so much you can do with mines, I figure.  Could maybe consolidate two of the +HP to mines bonuses, though, and instead provide them with a rate of fire boost or something. 

Maybe radar skills for in the misc. tree?  Figure if they're gonna go anywhere they should go there or in engineering.  Would probably make sense to have them, though, with the upgrades available on missiles, else a lot of that extra range is wasted. :)  Could also add in a higher-tier fuel discount to match the higher-tier repair discount to fill the tree out a bit.
#322
Exactly what I was thinking when I mentioned unique boosts for each weapon and having a kind of defined 'role' for each.  I likes it!  It also struck me that introducing attributes for the weapons in such a way also opens up the door for add-on modules along those lines to further tweak things for a user (like, say, an autoloader module that further reduced ballistic cooldown, perhaps at the expense of ammo capacity, ect.)  But that's not a skill thing. :)

Can't wait to see the next build, looking forward to it.

Edit: This made me remember a quick question, too, when it comes to base range version max range.  I can see a different in particle effects in the game, but how does it affect weapon numbers?  Shots just do less damage past the basic range or something?
#323
I like the new trees, some expansion in there.  Helps me with thinking about stuff for the mod, too, with the last box on the left, since I'm not really aware of what attributes are actually moddable/adjustable.  :)

Few ideas I had for BTC, though, and feel free to steal any you like:

I actually moved the +armor mods to the Engineering tree since it seemed to fit a bit better and that tree was pretty empty.  Had planned on putting them under 'defensive tech' along with shields, but I wasn't sure if shield attributes were moddable, now I know they are!  I also did the same for the generator, but you already added the generator tree to yours so that's excellent.  I also added a new weapons tree for (not suitable for vanilla, obviously).

I also started to key some items to certain technologies.  Much like II- and III-class weapons required deeper techs, I've started doing the same for things like shields.  As an example:

Basic Defense Tech: Everyone starts with this, gives you Civvie Shields and maybe 1-2 small upgrades.
Shield Tech 1: Gives access to the first level of 'military' shields.
Shield Tech 2: Gives access to Mk2 shields, which are roughly 50% better that Mk1.
Shield Tech 3: Gives access to specialty shields (just some weird stuff I was playing around with, like shields with a very low capacity but a very slight reset time for in-combat use, ect)

I also increased costs a fair bit on my tree as well, but that's just a stopgap measure.  The end goal of both the cost increase and my 'unlock' tiers was to force people to spend more points going down a tree and thus force them to specialize characters a bit, but that should only be necessary until the class system is revamped. :)

So far as fleshing out combat, though... which weapon stats are actually changable via the skill system?  One notion that I had was to give each weapon tech unique boostable attributes; for example, maybe you could lower the energy costs or recharge rate on energy weapons, the tracking on missiles, the max ammo on mines, ect.  Or even just a raw damage increase.  Something for people to invest in after they reach Large Weapons in a category.
#324
I'd like to make a post and narrow down what I'm looking for in terms of people.

Most sought-after would be a modeller at this point; I'm absolutely horrible at it (drafting in high school was a long, long time ago for me, and while I used to be a whiz with CAD if it tells you anything Autodesk had JUST released the first iteration of 3DS when I was graduating).  Skinning would be a close second, but most modding I've seen done pairs it with the base modelling anyway.

I'm personally pretty good at being creative and crunching numbers, and I can do basic graphical design (web designer here), but I'd welcome more people into the fold here as well to help check game balance and systems with numbers; once everything is in that I want to do, like the power systems adaptations, it'll probably be far too much for just one person to handle quickly. :)
#325
Mods / Re: ModsConfig.xml
July 02, 2014, 04:58:34 AM
This 100% fixed my issue as well, so you have my great thanks.  Now I can continue work on my great labor. :)

Incidentally (not sure if this should go down to bugs/fixes or not, but... ) before I tried loading with BTC I tried just changing it to UTF-8 and saving with the proper encoding, then trying to launch a game with the stock files.  Server was still crashing on me.  Once I added in BTC everything seemed to take just fine.  It might have just been a weird bug on my end, or it might be that other files got changed improperly between 0.8.3 and 0.8.4 (the base .XML files in the mod are from 0.8.3, and currently there is a copy of all of them in the .MPK)

TL;DR, if I change modsconfig.xml by hand like Fargham mentioned, I can get the 0.8.3 data files to load just fine.  0.8.4 data files still crash the server runtime on my end.
#326
Tried both of these, didn't seem to have an impact on it. :|

Just to be sure I went ahead and installed both virus and firewall exceptions for both voidexpanse.exe and AtomicTorch.SpaceRPG.Server.RuntimeWin.exe (which is the server, yeah?) and added a local path for UDP 12345.  Still didn't seem to help; from what I could see in my process list the main .exe was trying to launch the server process, the server process launched (very, very briefly) and then closed, thus the inability to connect to it.

At this point I tried to launch AtomicTorch.SpaceRPG.Server.RuntimeWin.exe by hand, much like launching a server for multi, and here's what I got:



Not really sure if this helps or not.  All I did was enter 'new' for a new world and then all the rest came.
#327
Joining a multiplayer works fine.  Trying to start up a single player, I see the local monoserver process start up briefly and then close.  Here are the logs:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/sir8vm1xoun5ixe/Log_VoidExpanse_Client_2014-06-30_12-18.log
https://www.dropbox.com/s/1d3uttepkfrul3k/Log_VoidExpanse_Server_2014-06-30_12-18.log

If the new version coming soon will fix the issue, though, feel free to let me know that.  I can be patient. :)
#328
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod
June 27, 2014, 10:07:45 PM
I actually hadn't looked at that page, I shall read up on it in a short while here.   All I had originally done was just extracted the core.cpk and worked with the files from there, then repackaged it.  New to modding of this type in general, I just tend to be okay with graphics and numbers. :)
#329
Mods / Re: Breaching the Core Full Mod
June 27, 2014, 10:13:32 AM
Now, hopefully that DropBox link works okay!

Here are some pictures, as well:


A showcase of the new icons/weapons.


The new Fusion Ray weapons at full focus.
#330
Mods / Breaching the Core Full Mod Discussion
June 27, 2014, 10:11:17 AM
Splitting this thread into two parts for my own sanity.  Can leave discussion here since I really, really like having people checking it out and dropping ideas, ect, but setting up another less-cluttered thread with just version-related stuff and the download link.  If this is okay with the AT guys. :)